EXTRACTS FROM A SPEECH,

BEFORE THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE PRESBYTERIAN

CHURCH,

At Philadelphia, in 1839.

THE SLAVE'S FALL.

For a man to fall into slavery is to descend as far below the lowest point of Adam's fall, as Adam's fall carried him below the dome of Heaven. For a slave falls out of himself. A slave falls below the capacity of getting up or inquiring where he is, or how he came there, or how he may get away; he falls so long through moral space that when he touches bottom, the laws of South Carolina and Louisiana say he is not to be regarded as a sentient being. Adam's fall left him at the point of knowing good and evil as he had practised them both, and he was a sentient being and could perceive it. The slave's fall is immense, as he goes so low he loses his manhood, and yet retains his shape; he has left behind him all rational companionship, and is found in the same field and on the same level with the braying ass, the bleating sheep, and the grunting swine. He hears the neighing of the horse on one hand, and the lowing of the ox on the other. The man has become a brute.-He is stock, property, a thing-and can claim no interest in the legs with which he walks, the legs are another man's-he has no ownership of the eyes with which he sees, they belong to another man-the ears with which he hears, are another's—and if anybody should rob him of his eyes or ears or hands he uses, he has no interest in the question, as they belong to another,

who, if the slave has lost his eyes or ears, or hands or legs, must sue for them and implead the offender, but the slave who was using them at the time they were bored out or exscinded, has no interest in the question. If this male chattel lives with a female chattel, and they should happen to have some little likenesses of themselves, they would be called young chattels, who would belong to the owner of the old chattels, and might be sold by the pound.

DUTY TO PARENTS.

God says, "Children, obey your parents;" if the slave parents were to order their children to go into the free States or Canada, Jamaica, Mexico or Barbadoes, and these children were to obey, that would soon pull out the foundation of our Republican form of government, if it rests on slavery, and let the beautiful superstructure of chattelship to the ground, with all the rising hopes of the New World.

I hope that the seven commands I have pointed out as inconsistent with the institution of slavery, will not be regarded as the device of an army of fugitive slaves, lately escaped out of slavery, by even the upholders of slavery of the present day. I hope it will not be urged that the command “children obey your parents," is not of celestial origin; and that there has been an interpolation or expurgation, and that it should read, "children obey your masters that your lives may be long in the land which the Lord your God shall give your masters."

DUTY OF CLERGYMEN.

Ministers of the Gospel have no business, say some, to interfere with the political institutions of their country, nor common Christians, say others; the men of this world cite them to such expressions as these "Render unto Cæsar,

the things that be Cæsar's." "Fear God and honor the King." "Be subject to the powers that be."

To be sure there is an immense difference between insurrection and reformation.

A general submission does not foreclose inquiry into principles, theories, or dogmas of government. Who is so proper as a good minister to cry aloud and spare not, and show the people their sins, whether in organic law or statute cruelty? The ministers of Christ should stand on the watchtowers of the nation, and point out that part of the constitution and laws, which runs athwart the ordinances of Heaven, and publish the crime and probe the conscience. Ministers of all denominations, in a slave State, should join in a universal outcry against the slave laws. For, otherwise, they cannot have a conscience void of offence; and they become the greatest of sinners, recreant to the authority of their high commission, and prove themselves unworthy ambassadors of Christ. The silence of ministers in relation to the criminality of slave laws becomes unpardonable. That silence is a dagger to the soul of the slave; that silence destroys his hopes and blasts his expectations; that silence. is moral cowardice, which may have lost the master and minister their souls. Again, this silence soon becomes acquiescence, which soon is apology, which is soon defence, which is soon vindication, which at last turns into a political truth maintained by the authority of the Holy Scriptures, and the minister becomes commentator, conscience keeper, expounder of hard sayings, until the Bible lies, at last, in the southern country, at the bottom of slavery, and the text-book of authority for its support.

It is a libel upon the Deity to suppose that it is a part of his system of Divine government that one man should make his fellow-man his brute. To say, that God, who made of one blood all nations of men under heaven, and commanded

man to love his neighbor as himself, and that we should do unto others as we would that others should do unto us: should tolerate American slavery, with all its odious deformities, is a flight, not up, but down, below the dark foundations of hell, which is paved with Slaveholding Divinityyea, tracts full of such theology would make Lucifer light his brimstone lamp to read them-and he would distribute them to each ruined maniac spirit, chained in his eternal cell, throughout his dark dominions, whose terrific yell of fiendish delight would make the pit, box and galleries of all perdition tremble with an improved sensation.

JUDICIAL MURDER.

The unoffending fugitive, who is outlawed by a southern county court proceeding, if he does not return to his master by a day certain, (and as a matter of course he knows nothing of this legal farce, of which he is never notified), he becomes as a "caput lupinum " a wolf's head, any man may shoot him down. As though the natural ferocity was not enough in a slave holding country, I have seen in the last two years not less than six cases, in which the master offered a reward of from $20 to $100 to any one who would hunt and shoot down his outlawed slave and bring him the head of the slave, so that he might identify him. What shall be said of the editor or the printer who could prostitute the art of printing, and who, for two dollars, the price of printing such a notice, could become accessory before the fact, to a murder? What can we think of a community which would patronize such papers, or of the state of religion and morals, where the law declared murder lawful, as in these cases; or of the judges at the county court who could prepare a general commission authorizing the whole community to spring upon and murder the most innocent and defenceless man in the world, whose only crime is, that

he thinks he has a better right to the use of his legs and hands than any mortal on earth. Fellow-traveller to eternity-fellow-Christian, this is a part of the judicial system, supposed necessary to thunder forth from Slavery's Vatican its decrees against the man who is unwilling to be beaten, whipped and starved as a slave; but prefers his liberty.

I am prepared to say there is not such a God-contemning, heaven and earth-insulting statute to be found out of the southern States, in the four quarters of the civilized or uncivilized world.

The various modes of murder of the fugitive slave, judicial or otherwise, have no parallel in the annals of the nineteenth century; and where we boast over the ancients of our steam, which has made the ends of the world neighbors, despising currents, laughing at tides, and disobeying the winds; which carries, at horse-race speed, a brigade of men across the land on a railroad, by the partnership power of a cord of wood and a hogshead of water, with all the other wonderful things, still this moral blot is wider, and throws into the shade more true greatness, than all the discoveries of the world could or can boast.

These bloody laws carry us back to barbarism-ah! barbarism itself would be so ashamed of such laws, that it would open to the right and left, and beg these slave States to pass. through their ranks without claiming any authority or precedent for these refined acts of legislative and judicial murder from any act of barbarism, ancient or modern.

SLAVEHOLDING CATECHISM.

Let our catechism be altered so as to read "Man's chief end is to glorify God, and enjoy him forever, except when he is a slave, then his chief end is to obey and honor his master, and avoid all the misery he can, and dodge as many of his master's blows as will be safe."